Andrea raced on his Ciao (1) in the icy night. The exam was less than twelve hours away and he felt the angst soaring inside of him as gradual and inexorable as a northern tide.

(1) Ciao: motor-scooter make. Very popular with Italian teens. Also extensively used by adults to dodge through the near-standstilled traffic of large urban centers, mainly in warmer central and southern Italy.

The lean must have sheared a main artery, for Andrea felt the blood invade districts that were foreign to it, fill up the cavities of his digestive system, fill up his esophagus, his throat, up to the palate, with its salty and bitter taste.

As the early cardiac spasms shook the bloodless body, Andrea's mind drifted back to zoology, to the fact that even this time he hadn't been able to pass that blasted exam, and then he recalled that flatworms lack a circulatory system as well as blood.

In the fall, with the cold, his job had gone. He had moved back to Rome and to the life of the have-not; evenings he supped at theCaritas' soup kitchen and at night, when it got cold, he slept at the train station, on the grates that blew off the warm air.

He had learned the secrets of medicine and herbs, and how to speak with the dead, recalling them from sleep. He had become the priest of the afterlife, beholding in his trances the rocky shores of hell.

For all that he had been powerful, second only to the village chief. But the knowledge of charms and magic rites did not shelter him from drought and famine. Like all the others, he had been forced to leave, emigrate, blend his desires with those of hundreds more.

He had no use for his magic arts in the western world; a useless burden that could certainly be no help toward making a living. He clasped the cadaver, soiling his coat with blood. He cleaned him as best he could; he brushed his hair.

Doveva aiutare quel poveretto, riportarlo in vita. Voleva sdebitarsi.

He must help that poor fellow, bring him back to life. He wanted to repay him.

It was risky, and in his life only a few other times had he recalled the dead to life. Souls do not fancy being diverted while en route to the infinite. Often they refuse to take back their mortal bodies. But he had nothing else to lose.

He began to repeat the psalm of the dead, the entreaty to the Mother of darkness. He asked that for once she let one of her children return where his journey had began. He implored that Andrea's soul reverse her upward spiral and descend again among us mortals.

As he mechanically repeated the magic words he was shaken by sobs. When he had finished, he kissed thedead on his mouth and covered him with his rags. Then he struggled back to his feet and limped slowly toward the main streets.

The last yearning in their life past turns into a basic and simple instinct, primitive and ancient; and because they are insentient beings they have no understanding of it, but abandon themselves to it passively.

It was almost a physiological need, like peeing would be to us. It was necessity to drive that lifeless body. If that base and primordial instinct were to be lacking, it would have been the end, the soul would separate once more, but, now burdened, she would dissolve a few meters from the earth.

It was the first time he picked up a girl in a discotheque. He wasn't one of those swift, hit-and-run-like predators; nay, he had rather fancied himself as an old and wise fisherman; of those who go angling, rod and reel, calm and yet inexorable when they get a bite.

Sabrina, that was the name of the gal from Genzano, had eyed him amidst a thousand others toiling on the floor, and had stuck to him like a remora to a tuna. At the third dance they were all over each other like the clown fish and the anemone. At the fourth he had launched his decisive attack with a breathtaking kiss.

He sped up the gears. Third. Fourth. Fifth. He could speed; the street was completely deserted. He went over the traffic island at one hundred and twenty when suddenly, before he could realize and act upon it, he hit something animate, a figure.

The car swerved first to the right and then to the left and ended up against a newsstand wrecking up its rolling shutter. The airbag exploded forming an hot-air balloon that pushed Giovanni back, preventing him from shattering his sternum onto the steering wheel.

His testicles froze as his breathing stopped in horror. He got closer, hastening his pace to a run. The man was dead. He must have been in his late twenties. Awfully pale. His shirt crimson with blood.

He pictured himself rotting in prison for the next twenty years. No more nights at the Palladium, no more sex with Sabrina amidst soft toys. Nothing of nothing. Then he heard the voice of conscience, if that could be called conscience, enjoining him:

The cadaver was now standing and was staggering forth. He had a countenance that gave you the creeps. White as a sheet. Foaming at the mouth. A satisfied sneer on his face. His eyes fixed. His shirt tattered and bloody. A total mess.

"The vertebra is each of the osseous elements of a discoid or cylindrical form which, disposed into a column, constitute the first portion of the axial skeleton of a wide group of animals, classified as subtype of chordates..."

"The vertebrates comprise animals characterized by an internal skeleton, also called endoskeleton, protective and supportive, and the anterior extremity of the neuroaxis, tubular, dilated to form the encephalo."

Enrico Terzini was driving his last night run of the 30 barrato. He was exhausted and his butt ached to boot. A giant carbuncle had popped out on his right buttock in the last two days which threatened to burst at any moment.

He couldn't wait to get to the terminus. He'd rush home and ask Maria, his wife, to intervene surgically on the monster, by squeezing it. He then would take a hot bath and hit the sack until three p.m..

Enrico let his tram roll on the tracks, mindful only to slow down at intersections. The traffic lights were still flashing. He started on the brakes as the stop approached. Leaning against the stop post there was a young man.

The doors opened, puffing. The punk seemed uninterested in the tram, but then decided to get on and struggled up the steps. He tripped on the last step and crashed head-on against the automatic ticket-stamping machine. A blow that made the whole car shake.

"The annelids are divided into three classes, the polychaetes, which are comprised of the marine annelids, the oligochaetes include sweet water forms and the earthworms, and, lastly, the hirudinea, among which we recall the leeches..."

Assunta Casini had never been to Rome. And she wasn't so thrilled of being there now, in that beastly cold. She was mad as hell. Her son, Salvatore, hadn't even come to pick her up at the train station. Worried, she had called him from a pay phone. That loafer was asleep.

"Mom, it's very easy. Right outside the station you'll find the streetcar stop; that's the 30barrato. Get on it. You do seven stops. You get off at the Colosseum. You call me from there. I'll come and get you right away. Piece o' cake".

Now standing, at the stop, she was cursing her son and herself for deciding to abandon, even only for a week, the place in which she had lived for sixty-three years without ever setting a foot without: Caianello.

Only a young man was sitting on one side. Assunta took a seat. Inside she felt the anxiety of being on the wrong tram. God knows where she'd have ended up. She rose and accosted the young man, and asked:

"The coelom of earthworms is divided into compartments by transverse septums, and the longitudinal and circular muscle structure is organized into segmented masses, corresponding to the subdivision of the coelom into compartments" said the young man as white as a sheet.

All Andrea had in his head were names, anatomy, zoological relationships and morphologies clogging up his brain, and he repeated them like a broken record. He did three times the complete route to and fro. The sun had soared high over the clouds and by now peoplewere beginning to crowd the car.

Many students with their books under the arm were packing the 30 barrato. Two girls, Marina Castigliani, 24 years old, tall with brown hair, and a short one, Tiziana Zergi, 25, dyed-blonde and with huge braces on her teeth, chattered holding on to the handrail.

"You know a heck of a lot, huh? You could do something about yourself, though; perhaps you ought to go home and get a bath. Did you study the part on the chordates?" Marina asked him, straightening her hair and turning up her nose a little.

Andrea had sunk his teeth into the tire of a scooter and was chewing it as though it were chewing gum. All three of them entered the old zoology building, which so much had given to science in the past and was now holding on wobbly upon those past laurels. The pair ahead, the living dead on tow.

Professor Amedeo Ermini, the luminary,was looking for a spot to park his Lancia Fulvia, unsuccessfully. All the streets around the campus were in a pandemonium. Cars parked in triple line, cars in the middle of the street, cars everywhere. At length he eyed something resembling a spot. He wedged his car in and prayed he wouldn't get a ticket. He got off his Lancia and started resolute toward the Zoology Institute.

Discoverer of a species endemic to the Asinara Island of Argas ergastolensis (Tic of the Lifetimer) he was by now a little old man, battered by aches and pains and by the malaria he had contracted in '56 in the Belgian Congo. He could no longer see so well and often mixed up the entrances, ending up in the History of Medicine department right across from the Zoology building.

Professor Ermini entered the lecture room. The students made way to let him through. One could have heard a pin drop. All waited in trepidation. He sat at the master's desk and took the sheet with the day's exam roll.

He hated exams. He was sad and disheartened; student grades were dropping year after year. They had no passion and aimed at passing the exam, putting together generic and imprecise answers. He questioned two. And flunked them. The last one had gone as far as saying that the whales were fish.

The owner of the backpack, a young fatso, seeing what Andrea was doing, gave him a kick in the ass. The zombie howled and started forward, toward the bottom of the lecture room. He found himself vis-à-vis with Ermini

"The Ctenophores are comprised of about ninety species of marine free-floating animals, with a gelatinous and transparent body. The ctenophores present a certain resemblance with the jellyfish of the cnidaria..."

Andrea began to open the silicone-sealed jars pulling out the contents. A cubomedusae, which he first let drain on the desk and then sucked as though it were an ice-lolly. He then picked up an enormous vase which contained a large tropical spider, and munched it as if it were Toblerone. To cap it all, he quenched his thirst with formaline, dirtying himself and letting out horrible noises

"Ma che fa? mi parli della speciazione, lasci perdere i barattoli!"

"What are you doing? Tell me about speciation, and leave those jars alone!"

He went on speaking without interruptions for an hour of the sexual habits of the ophiura. Ermini was beaming. A brilliant student, at last; one who had studied, who knew the matter in depth; a somewhat restless and agitated temperament, to be sure.

Ermini was so impressed by Andrea's zoological cognitions that he offered him to do his thesis with him, and become an intern in his department. He entrusted him with the classification of the social insects dwelling in Rome's sewer system.

Zombies, as everyone knows, have a bent for this kind of activity. He returned to the institute with bagfuls of little animals, and because he wasn't so accurate in the collection, every now and again he slipped in a rat or two, which made the professor's lab their home.

In time, he began to decompose, his tissues to fall to pieces. So at night, when the department was deserted, Andrea slipped into an aquarium filled with formaline, in order to keep in shape. He remained there, tranquil, immersed in the solution, repeating the characteristics of the echinoderms, the embryonic development of the cirripedes.

He had a fast career and became assistant and finally professor. In time they all, even his colleagues, began to be fond of him. He acquired fame with a research on the nutritive value of the centipedes. He never stopped howling and eating snots, but the students, who are indulgent people, loved him just for that.